Possible Specs of the AMD Volcanic Islands’ Hawaii GPU

This week was certainly a week of AMD Volcanic Islands series news. Let’s make a short overview and add something to the discussion. Usually I don’t like spreading unconfirmed information, but I thought that you should know it as well, only to decide if it’s trustworthy on your own.

Volcanic and Pirtate Islands Codenames

Almost every popular website shared the information about the leaked codenames of Volcanic Islands GPUs. The leak appeared on HWINFO change-log website. All these sites forgot that the same website posted the information about TITAN ULTRA, which turned out to be a complete fake.

Volcanic Islands

Nevertheless some of the mentioned GPUs actually do exists. The most interesting one is obviously Hawaii, which I will describe further in next paragraphs. Additionally, we should see Maui, Iceland, Tonga and New Zealand all known as volcanic islands. The performance positioning of these GPUs is yet unknown, thus it’s pointless to speculate at this moment. Although, we should expect more leaks about the mid-range and entry-level segments in coming weeks.

Crystal Series

The Crystal Series are mobile parts of the same series. It is said that these GPUs will feature an improved architecture and better performance. According to the leak, we may see three models: Vesuvius, Topaz and Amethyst. One would notice that Vesuvius is not exactly a crystal, but a well known volcanic island.

Pirate Islands

The new architecture based on 20nm process codename Pirate Islands would arrive no sooner than 2015. While the specifications are impossible to predict right now, we can at least say that there should be at least three GPUs: Bermuda, Treasure and Fiji.

Hawaii GPU to debut with the new FirePro series

Two sites claim to know the exact week of the Hawaii launch. According to them AMD could possibly release the processor in Hawaii, something that is actually not very surprising, because AMD is known for such events. AMD would supposedly unveil their new GPU in the week starting from September 23rd. Additionally it is said that the launch would be more focused on the technology and the GPU itself, rather than the new series in terms of graphics cards models. Probably the best assumption is that AMD would launch their new desktop series together or near the launch of the Battlefield 4, a Gaming Evolved title.

Hawaii GPU performance

A member of Chiphell community shared a picture of the 3DMark benchmark results. The result shows the Extreme Preset score of 4816, which is higher than both GTX 780 and GTX TITAN. Don’t get too excited though, since there’s absolutely no way of validating these numbers. You should already know that there’s no reason to hide the name of the card or some basic specifications unless someone is really trying to spread misinformation. Since the appearance of the faked picture of the HD 8970 we should be more careful while talking about such leaks.

AMD Radeon R9 D970 Specifications

25% better than HD 7970 GHZ Edition

I left the best part for the end.

While the naming of the new series is not verified, this is most likely the best possible name for the new card. My information about the D970 comes from a very good source, however it’s always good to take them with a grain of salt.

It is believed that the Hawaii GPU would be equipped with 2560 Stream Processors along with 40 ROPs. The clocks would be the same as on Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition with the same memory capacity and interface. In fact AMD likes round numbers, so if they are to increase the clocks that would be by 25/50 MHz steps.

I was told that the new Radeon would be 20-30% faster than the current flagship. The score you can see above says exactly the opposite, but you probably shouldn’t believe that the new Radeon would be more than 50% faster than the current model. After looking at the specs I received I noticed that we are looking at almost perfect 25% scaling.

Is it yet too early to talk about the details. Treat these specs as a prediction, not a leak.